Question

I’m using json-simple and I need to pretty-print JSON data (make it more human readable).

I haven’t been able to find this functionality within that library.
How is this commonly achieved?

Answer 1

Google’s GSON can do this in a nice way:

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().setPrettyPrinting().create();
JsonParser jp = new JsonParser();
JsonElement je = jp.parse(uglyJsonString);
String prettyJsonString = gson.toJson(je);

or since it is now recommended to use the static parse method from JsonParser you can also use this instead:

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().setPrettyPrinting().create();
JsonElement je = JsonParser.parseString​(uglyJsonString);
String prettyJsonString = gson.toJson(je);

Here is the import statement:

import com.google.gson.*;

Here is the Gradle dependency:

implementation 'com.google.code.gson:gson:2.8.7'